Rebuilding a pure Aryan home in the Paraguayan jungle

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David Woodard, a SF composer and maker of dream machines, who wants to save a small Paraguayan town.
in San Francisco
3/1/05 Chris Hardy / San Francisco Chronicle

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David Woodard, a SF composer and maker of dream machines, who wants to save a small Paraguayan town.
in San Francisco
3/1/05 Chris Hardy / San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: Chris Hardy

Photo: Chris Hardy

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paraguay_ch_062.jpg
David Woodard, a SF composer and maker of dream machines, who wants to save a small Paraguayan town.
in San Francisco
3/1/05 Chris Hardy / San Francisco Chronicle

paraguay_ch_062.jpg
David Woodard, a SF composer and maker of dream machines, who wants to save a small Paraguayan town.
in San Francisco
3/1/05 Chris Hardy / San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: Chris Hardy

Rebuilding a pure Aryan home in the Paraguayan jungle

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In the late 19th century, a handful of German families settled in a remote jungle of Paraguay, where they intended to create a racially pure utopian settlement called Nueva Germania.

The experiment was a colossal failure.

The settlers were unprepared for the devastating diseases and other hardships of jungle life, and their descendants -- some of whom intermarried with the darker-skinned locals -- are among the poorest people in one of the poorest countries in South America.

But now they have an unlikely champion: a Wagner-loving San Francisco composer who is mounting a determined crusade to rebuild the Aryan dream and has sought assistance from Vice President Dick Cheney, two U.S. philanthropic groups, a Southern California town council, Bay Area artists, and a U.S. filmmaker best known for the underground movie "Scorpio Rising" and the book "Hollywood Babylon."

"As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture, I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle," says David Woodard, who lives on Mount Davidson and studied musical composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Woodard, who is also the musical director of the Los Angeles Chamber Group, a 14-member ensemble that specializes in playing at memorial services, insists he is not a white supremacist, but rather a man driven by a vision of his musical hero that happened to bear fruit in a patch of land located about 120 miles north of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.

"Nueva Germania represents an aesthetic sanctuary conceived by Wagner; a place where Aryans could peaceably go to experience life and pursue the advancement of Germanic culture," he said. The Germans currently populating Nueva Germania number about 100 families, most descended from the original colonists, who arrived in 1886.

Among the pioneers was Elisabeth Nietzsche-Foerster -- sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche -- who sailed to Paraguay with 14 German families to start a socialist, vegan utopia along the Aguaraya River. She got the idea after reading an 1880 essay by Richard Wagner called "Religion and Art," in which the composer ranted against Germany's 1871 emancipation of the Jews.

But the colonists were unable to get crops to grow, and many fell victim to malaria, tuberculosis, snakebites and sand fleas. After two years, Nietzsche-Foerster's husband, a notorious anti-Semitic propagandist named Bernhard Foerster, committed suicide by swallowing poison after a drinking binge. His widow returned to Germany in 1893.

Today, the Nietzsche-Foerster home in Nueva Germania lies in ruins, the original Lutheran church and the German school have been closed for more than a decade, while the German-speaking descendants barely eke out a living as subsistence farmers.

Woodard, born and raised in Santa Barbara, is a thin man with stooped shoulders who favors large, dark sunglasses. Now in his mid-30s, he also manufactures replicas of a psychedelic contraption called a Dreamachine, a motorized cylinder that spins and creates a strobe effect. Invented in 1959 by the Beat writer Brion Gysin, it is supposed to paint pictures inside the viewer's head. Woodard says his clients have included rockers Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop and Beck.

When Woodard first visited Nueva Germania last year, he found most of its residents living in tin-roofed adobe homes with no indoor plumbing, electricity or telephones. The children walk seven miles to the nearest Spanish-language school.

Still, Woodard found that some have not given up on the idea of a racially pure homeland and prefer to marry their cousins rather than non- German Paraguayans.

Compelled by what he had witnessed, Woodard, on his return to San Francisco, wrote a seven-minute anthem called "Our Jungle Holy Land" and managed to get several Bay Area artists to participate.

"I thought it was an intriguing project, a bizarre thing of a colony of Germanic people in the jungle," said Kimarie Torre, a San Francisco soprano who sings on the recording. "I know this colony was started as an Aryan nation, but I saw the music as an homage to their country."

Woodard says he first learned of Nueva Germania after reading "Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche," a 1992 book by a London Times journalist, Ben MacIntyre.

As a part-time resident of the Los Angeles County town of Juniper Hills, Woodard tried to convince fellow council members to take advantage of a unique opportunity to become a sister city to a town "conceived by a master composer. " Council members in the small town of 500 nestled in the foothills on the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains decided to consider the request in 2003, council minutes show.

In December 2003, the council removed Woodard for failure to attend meetings and for "pursuing his own agenda" regarding Nueva Germania, according to council treasurer Dave Reichel.

"He told us it was a quaint town with a musical background. We knew nothing of an Aryan utopia or Nietzsche," recalled Reichel. "If we had known, I am 100 percent sure we wouldn't have messed with that."

Reichel said the council was dismayed to later find a link to Nueva Germania and the mention of a sister city alliance on the community's Web site, www.juniperhills.net, which Woodard developed.

The link includes a recording of "Our Jungle Holy Land," which "celebrates our sister city project with Nueva Germania," as well as a written response from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. "The Vice President was pleased to learn of your community's interest in establishing sister city status with Nueva Germania" reads the letter.

The mention of a sister city alliance on the Juniper Hills Web site has attracted at least two U.S. philanthropic groups.

Dr. Larry Nichter, who heads a Huntington Beach (Orange County) group that sends plastic surgeons to poor Third World communities to help those suffering from physical deformities, sent a letter to the White House last March that read: "The Plasticos Foundation is delighted to support and join Juniper Hills' sister city project with Nueva Germania, Paraguay. We are concerned about severe phenotypic mutations accrued over 125 years of inbreeding and the profound effects these are likely to have on the daily life of Nueva Germania's inhabitants."

Reached at his office, Nichter said he is still waiting for more information before sending a team to Paraguay. "We are on hold, but this incredible history fascinates me," he said.

Woodard also contacted the Kansas-based humanitarian group Heart to Heart International, which donated $12,500 of medicines to Nueva Germania. The group's officials, when told, were surprised to learn that no sister city relationship exists.

"David Woodard's application described their needs and the sister city project," said Dan Neal, the group's international program manager. "That's how it came about."

The Juniper Hills town council is now trying to distance itself from both Woodard and Nueva Germania. Council President Vance Pomeroy said the town has created a new Web site -- www.juniperhills-ca.org -- and will ask the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which assigns domain names, to shut down the original Web site.

Woodard is certainly no stranger to eccentric undertakings -- and potentially unpopular causes.

In 2001, Woodard wrote and conducted a 12-minute piece called "Ave atque Vale" -- which he called "Onward, Valiant Soldier" in English, although the direct translation is "Hail and Farewell" -- for Timothy McVeigh on the eve of his execution near the Terre Haute, Ind., federal prison where the convicted perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, 19 of them children, was incarcerated.

After being denied permission to perform the piece at the prison, Woodard played it at a nearby Roman Catholic church 12 hours before the execution.

"McVeigh was portrayed as this insane, dangerous person who had no basis or reason," Woodard said, "but that omits the importance of his ultimate motivation -- to stem the rise of the inappropriate actions of the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) and the FBI."

Woodard has also been commissioned by Exit, a Swiss right-to-die group, to orchestrate the "Bach-like pastoral pieces" written by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the controversial Michigan doctor who is serving 10 to 25 years in prison on charges connected with assisted suicide.

And the San Francisco musician-entrepreneur continues his South American crusade.

Early next month, he will return to Nueva Germania with American filmmaker Kenneth Anger, director of the 1963 cult favorite, "Scorpio Rising," and author of the best seller "Hollywood Babylon." Prominent Swiss novelist Christian Kracht will accompany them.

"I shall be assembling ideas for an historical Swiss novel," Kracht said in an e-mail message from Nepal, where he publishes a German-language magazine. Woodard said has also bought Elizabeth Nietzsche-Foerster's old property with the intention of building a "scaled-down version" of the Bayreuth Festival House, an opera house designed by Wagner in 1876. "I know it sounds absurd, but there are a lot of Wagner fans, and with satellite Internet connection and Web casting, I could use this historic land to compose and record music," he said.

He also says he is planning to build a "Dreamachine factory" on the site where Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp doctor who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other Nazi victims, once lived while hiding out after World War II.

The devices, which cost between $500 and $6,000 each, would bring badly needed employment for "disillusioned Aryan youths," he says. "We have a chance to help Caucasians in the middle of the jungle. I would like to see this unlikely concept go someplace positive, and not crumble into a lost subculture, " he said.

"With the reopening of the school, church and building of an opera house, the spirit of these people would have a new light. It would please me to see a light at the end of the tunnel after 125 years."